Hello And Other Death Threats
by Swordage
Summary: Rodney makes use of the lessons John had to give him about How Not To Be A Hostage and makes new friends that want to kill him for his brain.
1. Original Flavor

After a week of running, a constant panic attack clenching his throat shut and making that whole running thing harder than it should have been, after seven days of exposure to the elements (two days of skull-splitting storm, and he wasn't sure he'd regained his hearing yet) and five nights of napping between bursts of terror, Rodney is actually relieved to be dropped in a nice, dark cell. He lays flat on his back, limbs askew, and closes his eyes. Just for a minute, to shut out the angry yelling and clanging and assorted other prison noises. The stone under the back of his head is cool, dryer than anything he's touched for one hundred eleven hours (give or take, it's a nice number) and he falls asleep without meaning to.

He wakes in what feels like minutes to a damp cloth on his cheeks, pain blooming dull in his skin, and he fights off waves of disorientation and nausea to look around. The ceiling is the first thing he sees, and just that simple fact - _oh hey, a roof, been a while_ - reminds him of the bars on the window in his door and that no one else was in here when they brought him in. He thinks.

He blinks slowly and remembers to look at the other person, still with the cloth and the dabbing at his cheeks. He tries to say something, but his voice crackles once and goes quiet.

"I am the healer," the young man that looks a little like Sheppard around the hair says, not pretending to smile. "Lie still. You are ill, and movement will give you pain and make the warriors at your door nervous." He brushes back Rodney's hair with startlingly gentle fingers, picking leaves and twigs out of the strands.

They go through the motions of care, Rodney sucking clean water greedily from the rag, tasting his own sweat on it with each unsatisfying mouthful. He's stripped and drenched and rubbed clean, and the guards ignore the glares from the shaman or doctor or whatever and take Rodney's clothes and don't give him anything else to wear. He can tell by the set of the other man's jaw that there will probably be clean clothes later, regardless of what the military in this place has decided. That comforts him a bit, a little like home.

The healer leaves at some point - Rodney's fairly sure he fell asleep again and doesn't really blame himself. He hasn't eaten much lately, and his hands have gone past shaking and out the other side into unresponsiveness. He thinks longingly of the salt-bitter cloth and the clear, cold water so casually wasted on his skin, and then he starts making escape plans.

They come for him just as he's settled down to work at the edges of the door (no frame to pry apart, hinges on the other side, but he'd find a way, the door was the weakest part of any room) and unknowingly help him mark exits and memorize guard posts. He catches a cutting slice of sunlight through a quickly-closed hatch in the ceiling of a dead end, and he thinks nonsensically, _Genii._ Underground bunkers, of course, and next they'd get out the nuclear devices and ensure he was entirely uncapable of passing on his sterling genetics through anything short of cloning.

They get out a camera instead, dirty and standard-issue with "Sony" on the side under a thin layer of oily residue. It's on the floor, and he briefly wonders why they want to videotape his feet, and then they shove him to his knees and he thinks, _ah._ He starts grinning, all teeth and wide eyes taking in the two exits and five soldiers and one officer pacing in a slow circle around him and he wonders if they actually turned the camera on.

One guard toes it, bringing up a red light, and there goes that theory. Smarter than the average monkey, then.

He realizes he's staring at the expressionless lens with a seriously fucked grin on his face and a prime view of his penis, and he realizes that this video is going straight back to Atlantis possibly at this very second, and he realizes that the liquid running down his cheeks is a mixture of plasma and blood from the sores of his sunburn, and he starts to shake. He isn't sure if he's laughing or crying until the officer forces his chin up with a crop (a fucking crop, they have riding crops in the Pegasus galaxy, there aren't even real horses in the Pegasus galaxy) and he's still grinning teeth.

No one says anything the entire time, or if they do he can't hear it over the roaring in his ears of his heart after the first blow to the head. He stays on his knees, nice and obedient, legs splayed out until his balls curl up from the floor. They knock him over and he gets up, each time slower than before, carefully feeling out each new bruise and cut. They stop when a misplaced blow to his gut brings up thin bile and a bright thread of blood, slowly dyeing the wet splatter pink. He stares at it for a long time before the understanding that they're done seeps in, and he looks up at the camera again, looks right into the unfeeling stare of the lens. He's not sure if he should wave (hands tied behind his back, right) or smile (his face feels broken, ugly and painful from exposure and two quick, professional blows meant to stun) or maybe symbolically bite through his tongue (but the whole point of this indignity is to be rescued at the end) and in the end he doesn't do anything before they drag him off.

There's a long shirt, pretty much a dress, waiting in his cell. A bowl of water and a cloth as well, but he doesn't waste it on cleaning himself for the second time in one day, just cradles it in his unbroken arm and sips now and then, when his stomach can take it. It doesn't taste like sweat, but his mouth tastes like blood and that's close enough.

He sleeps for a long time, some indeterminate length of time, and he dozes for longer - the healer comes and goes, the frown line between his brows worse each time, and when the guards come for him again the healer is with them with arms folded sternly. Rodney grins and laughs silently, shoulders shaking so badly they have to carry him by his upper arms until the doctor makes noises about dislocation.

He's stripped in the interrogation room, which isn't exactly hard or a surprise. He goes limp this time, makes them work for it, flops onto his back to protect his kidneys and rolls with the blows. He kicks the camera when they knock him close enough, and there's swearing and shouting and a lot of dizzyness after that. He ends up held on his knees, arms twisted behind his back, and the camera held about a foot in front of his face. He wonders if Carson is checking his pupils for signs of concussion, starts giggling silently, and decides that's probably a yes on the concussion.

The officer is still talking, making threatening noises that mean absolutely nothing, and Rodney rolls his eyes and makes a talking hand motion behind his back where unfortunately the camera can't see. The officer can, though, and the crop descends with enough force to bring a sharp, wet line across Rodney's cheek and he thinks vague thoughts about head wounds bleeding a lot as the doctor shrieks obscenities and nearly breaks the camera getting the officer away from Rodney. He wonders why that was the objectionable thing, the last straw, thinks about that long and hard before he falls unconscious.

The next day (he thinks it's a day, he's really bad at determining time without a clock or at least a sun) is long. He laps at his water, wonders if he can curl his tongue like a cat, tries until he can, examines the new bandages, stretches sore muscles and stiff skin, works at the door until the guards change shifts, thinks about power flow and effective communication channels, considers waste management as a hobby, decides to make it Kavanagh's hobby instead, plots to raid Zelenka's stash of pens, almost blacks out checking to make sure his arm was set while he'd been passed out in a manly fashion, chases two mice and finds a possible weakness in the wall he'd overlooked in his earlier disorientation, and by the time they come for him he's relieved. He'd been about to start gnawing on his fingers so he'd have something to write with to get the damn equations out of his head.

The officer (same officer every time, the guy needs a hobby, maybe he likes waste management?) seems a little thrown by Rodney's friendly nod, has him stripped and shoved to his knees anyway. The floor is colder than usual, so perversely Rodney wriggles down lower, refusing to show the discomfort they expect. His broken arm, bound behind his back, is a fire-dull burst of pain that starts anew every goddamn second. He smiles cheerfully at the camera, holds in the urge to lick his lips nervously. Waste of water, he doesn't know when he'll get water again for sure.

The doctor comes in late, clearly even more pissed off than yesterday, and Rodney gets the idea he wasn't exactly invited this time. He stands within view of the camera, the genius, beautiful man, scowling darkly at the officer the entire time as he paces circles around Rodney, whip tapping the hard leather of his boot with every step. It's a new whip, long and shiny and darker at the end than it is at the handle. Rodney can't hold in his curiosity, has to know - he leans over as the man passes his left, touches his tongue to the loose fall of the tip and yeah, that leather hasn't been near a horse since the animal died to make it - it tastes of oil and blood and human sweat.

The officer's stopped, looking down at him with a frightening intensity, and it's right about then he realizes that he's just taken this whole thing to a level he really didn't want to go to, and then he realizes that fear is not a good look for himself right now and he's just given these people what might be the key to breaking him. He knows just as abruptly that if his Colonel is watching this, he knows it too, and that's almost as horrible.

That session ends normally, a broken finger and a long gash up the sole of his right foot, and he practises walking on it until he's sure he can escape despite it, and then he washes the blood off the floor with his precious water so no one else will know he can do it. He spends some time prying at the mousehole, getting a few bites for his troubles, and decides that what he really needs is a bedroll and room service.

They come for him early, just as he's settling down to run inventory of his injuries. The guards that fetch him are white-lipped, reluctant and scared and ill, and that makes him more nervous than he already was.

They put him in a room alone with the man and the camera, all the guards carefully outside the room with the doors shut but not locked. Rodney knows better than to think they're gone, or that he has a chance of escaping - the apparent carelessnessonly means increased security, he knows that, but it's still a chance for something.

They start off with expert lashes across his back, which Rodney had expected with resignation, but when the red-dripping leather is shoved into his mouth he tries to scream, feeling something in his throat tear with a tiny spark of pain, tries to bite fingers muffled by leather gloves, tries to blink back tears and hold back his gag reflex and keep himself from shaking. He doesn't succeed at any of it, although he does manage not to choke on his own vomit, even though he has to lick it off the whip and boots and floor. He doesn't make his tongue do the cat-curl, punishes himself for being so goddamn weak by lapping up his bile with a flat tongue, tasting every square surface inch. He doesn't look at the camera, not even when the thick curl of the whip pushes his face in that direction, looks anywhere but at the camera, anywhere but at Atlantis.

That isn't the worst of it, but he blanks out blissfully, like drinking too much and forgetting how much embarassment you caused yourself. He comes back to himself in his cell, not sure how long it's been or what happened, and the doctor doesn't come to see him. He carefully presses fingers against his ass and there's a blissful lack of pain, relief tangible in the absence of blood. The crop-cut on his face is bleeding again, but he ignores it and focuses on swallowing water instead.

There's no recording at the regular time, to his relief, and he spends the time considering nutrition. He's given a hunk of bread the size of his fist, and that makes him realize that he should be dead by now - no solid food in days, and yet he's not weakening from starvation. There must be something in the water, and he longs to determine if it's an additive or natural properties, to bring samples to Atlantis to delegate to someone else. He lets the bread soak before he even thinks about eating it, and it's a good thing he only put half the stuff in his bowl because it's all he can do to eat that much. He saves the rest for later and busies himself thinking of ways to keep it from the mice in a perfectly blank room. He ends up shoving little pieces into his cheek until they dissolve in his saliva, eating without adding anything to his stomach, and finally gives the last crumbs to the mice anyway. They nip his fingers more than usual when he works at their hole, but he can't get too angry. It was pretty good bread.

The doctor is back the next day with a tiny flashlight he recognizes from his own pack. There's a thorough examination of his mouth, but when the man presses fingers against his Adam's apple and orders him to hum, he just blinks instead. The pressure hurts distantly, less than his arm or fingers or foot or back or ribs or face, but he knows it might be worse because he needs his voice. The rest can get better, will get better, but he needs his voice. Atlantis needs his voice.

The next recording session, he tries to give them what they want, tries to break and scream and beg, but all he can do is move his lips until the officer looks at him posessively and orders everyone else out. The guards are startled and unsure but they go, don't want to stay or listen or be anywhere near this room, and that's when Rodney realizes this is his chance. No increased security, just a confident man who walks too close.

Rodney doesn't try to mask the thud as he trips him, just rolls onto him and bites down because he has no other weapons and his sparring sessions never got to where he could snap a neck with his thighs like Teyla. The wet choked noises under his teeth keep his eyes darting from door to door, flinching against the clawing nails raking over his face, and he makes sure not to let go too soon. Holds on until the pulse under his bottom lip is gone, until it's been a small eternity since the last struggles, and then he wriggles until he can get a knife off the dead man's belt and cut himself loose. He licks his lips nervously, gaze darting to the camera that's at slightly the wrong angle, that may or may not have recorded the whole thing, and he hopes no one is monitoring the damn thing remotely because if they are he is so screwed.

He crouches by the doors and presses light as air with his fingertips until he figures out which one is unlocked, and then he doesn't have a plan better than running like hell, so he blows a kiss at the camera and Atlantis and his team safe at home and not held as bargaining chips, and he takes a deep breath and goes.

It takes two endless days to sneak to the gate, and then he's completely stumped by the armed guard constantly monitoring it. He stays far away, far enough that they're ants milling in military precision around a bottlecap, and studies the pattern of dialing in. Someone comes running every time the wormhole activates, talks on a radio in agitation, and he really wishes he could listen in, and then abruptly the wormhole closes and they start dialing out, and he knows this is his one and only godsend of a chance.

He gets down to the gate just as they slide through a small tape, the kind that camcorders use, and before he can think better of it he runs like hell for the pretty blue, because running like hell is still the best idea he's had.

He makes it through, mostly by virtue of tripping, and he falls out the rematerialization at the exact velocity he entered the event horizon and falls on his face. Voices erupt all around him and the beautiful sheen of a shield frosts across the gate behind him and he grins up at the beautiful art-deco ceiling and decides he has great luck, really incredible luck. There's familiar uniforms pulling him away from the gate, lovely P-90's all around, and he could just kiss someone. He's just that happy, feeling so good he's limp all over, grinning so wide he thinks he's split his face or possibly just the clawed cuts on his cheeks.

There's a handful of brilliant flashes of bodies rematerializing against the shield, and then his team is there. Teyla strips off her jacket and rests it around his shoulders, and that's about when he realizes he's naked and starts to blush with most of his body. Naked in the gateroom, jeez, it's like teenage nightmares about high school except with Marines. Ronon scoops him up like some romance heroine, and he obligingly tosses his arms around the guy's neck and kisses him on the cheek, and he can feel Ronon's laugh against his side, real and there and _real,_ and John is at the top of the stairs with the most broken look in his eyes so Rodney waves reassuringly and falls unconscious.

He wakes in Carson's infirmary, and he knows instantly that he's in Atlantis, although it takes a few more moments to remember the sequence of events. Yawning widely, he stretches to pop his back, and the two motions split more than a few scabs open. Carson will have a fit. He considers that for a moments before scrambling for the chart hung at the end of his bed.

He knows enough medical jargon (years of what of other people called hypochondria and he called justified paranoia) to determine that the list of his injuries is pretty accurate, but he's not sure if he's got an infection. There's no mention of his larynx, so they probably thought he'd been so quiet from shock and bravery and stuff like that. Idiots.

That's when John comes in, of course, poking his head through the privacy curtain with a little lop-sided smile.

"Hey," he says brightly, "Can I come in?" Rodney rolls his eyes and nods assent, adjusting his pillow so he can sit up. John gives him a hand, because one-armed pillow-wrangling is really kinda difficult. He can technically still use his broken arm, since one of the two bones in his forearm is still intact, but there's no reason to push himself here.

"So we got your message," John says a little petulantly. "But I still don't get why you had to stay behind." Oh, the message he sent off after he was captured but before they took his things. The message he'd barely finished before the radio was jerked off his ear. The message that he thinks might have been the last words he'll ever speak, and it's that thought that makes him look away from John guiltily.

"Hey," John says gently, reaching out to put a warm hand on Rodney's shoulder, "It's okay. I get it, shit happened. That happens to us a lot. I just wanted to help, and you sounded so pissed off when I tried to talk..."

Rodney's glaring at him hard enough to actually get his attention, and then he mimes writing on a paper. John goes a step better and brings him a laptop - Rodney's not actually sure they have paper, and anyway he types a hell of a lot faster than he can write out.

'They didn't know it was a radio until you talked back,' Rodney jots down, spinning the screen around almost before he hits the last keys. That had really been irritating, losing his last connection to Atlantis just before breaking loose and spending a week in the wild instead of getting picked up by jumper or something.

The expression on John's face cracks a little as he reads it, though, and Rodney suddenly realizes that John blames himself and has definitely watched all the damn tapes and is probably now reciting a list of all the ways he could have rescued Rodney if he only hadn't talked back when Rodney told him to run for the gate.

Rodney does the rational thing and slaps him upside the head.

"Ow," John objects, but it brings him back to the here and now, and Rodney types as fast as he can before John goes off to his guilty place again.

'I did fine, you have control issues, and why don't I have an IV? Carson's slipping, he usually jumps at the chance to stick a needle into someone.'

John's brow draws together, confusion instead of worry, and he says, "But you're fine. I mean, aside from massive trauma, and please stop getting hit in the head, you're nourished and hydrated and everything."

'Idiots, the lot of you,' Rodney types furiously. 'It was the damn water, then. It's really incredible stuff. I wanted to bring back samples. It must provide full nutritional value, but I never figured out if it was an additive, and they clearly eat other things because there was that bread, so it was probably an additive after all.' John ends up reading over his shoulder instead of waiting for Rodney to finish, and by the end he's gone a little green.

"All they gave you was water? Carson, get in here!" He sticks his head out and ends up with a nurse instead, and Rodney's never been so glad to see a needle. He knows for a fact he can't handle solid food right now, and if they tried to feed him he'd get sick all over everything and that would just be embarrassing.

Through the gap in the curtain he can see Radek pacing, and he wonders why on earth Radek is in the infirmary until he realizes the crazy man must be here to visit Rodney, that he's actually waiting his turn to visit Rodney, and his fingers find the keyboard before he can think better of it.

'Thank you,' he writes for John. 'It helped,' a long pause to take a deep breath and brace himself for complete honesty, 'to know that you were watching. If it had just been me,' and he has to stop and try that again, 'I can't be brave for myself.'

John shoos the nurse away and leans over Rodney's shoulder, frowning at the look on his sunburned face. "Hey," he starts, "what's wrong?"

Rodney gestures at the screen impatiently and watches John's face as he reads, watches how the skin around his eyes tighten, how his face doesn't go dead with guilt and recrimination. It goes right by that into predatory, that closed-off look that haunted him every time Kolya's name was mentioned in casual conversation, the look that says _if you build me a nuclear bomb, I'll push it through the damn gate myself._

'So,' Rodney types, watching John still instead of his fingers, 'how do you feel about explosives?'

John grins like a madman, and Rodney grins right back.


	2. Citrus Remix

"There's no time," McKay hisses over the distance-crackle of the radio, "Get back to Atlantis and come back with your jumper."

"It'll be faster if we just-" John starts to argue, but Rodney snaps a sharp negation and the radio goes silent.

"He's evading," he tells Ronon and Teyla unnecessarily. "He'll be fine, we need to get reinforcements, a cloaked jumper..." He keeps thinking up plans all the way back to the gate, recon and rescue and anything other than how McKay's voice shook over the airwaves.

He never really remembers what happens after he steps through the gate, although he knows what happened as a series of facts: he got a jumper and went back, flew search patterns over the last known position (and why the fuck did he let McKay out of his sight, even with helpful native guides, especially with helpful native guides) and searched desperately for a radio signal.

He remembers clearly the moment they picked it up, and the moment a half-breath later when a clipped military voice said their search was useless. And how he stared down at the people fanning out in a search pattern on the ground and thought, _those aren't my people, they don't have him yet, they want us to think they do._

"Prove it," he said. The radio was silent.

They watch the video together by silent consensus, Elizabeth and Radek and Carson and Teyla and Ronon and John. There's a peeling brown fingerprint on the unlabelled black, a pointed remark that tells them exactly how bad this is going to be, and John can't help but be relieved. Blood means bleeding means the heart is still beating, it means Rodney hasn't annoyed them so badly he's not worth keeping as a bargaining chip. It means there's still hope.

The first few seconds of tape are documentary of the goddamn ruins McKay had been exploring on his own, painstaking slow pan over Ancient text that suddenly drops into the grass and auto-focuses on a pair of shiny dark boots. John feels sick already, his eyes fixed on those damn boots, and he's caught entirely off-guard when a moment later the image shifts with a burst of static and he's left staring at Rodney's balls pressed against a cement floor.

There's little noises all around him, swears and gasps and growls, and he just digs his nails into his palms and watches. Has to watch, owes it to McKay to witness this. He memorizes the way they've bound McKay's wrists behind his back, the dazed grin on his sunburned face, every scratch and bruise and shadow of dirt that show he's been good enough to stay out of their clutches for a week. John grins back every time they hit him and he just gets back up, settles back on his toes and knees for the next strike. That's his McKay. That's his Rodney, scientist and explorer and braver than he knows. Carson's litany of possible injuries and effects of each strike and shock and exposure is almost reassuring, filling in where Rodney should be groaning about every ailment under the sun. Complaining about the damn crop, because shit, there are no fucking horses in the Pegasus galaxy, why the fuck does this guy have a riding crop?

The moment the video stops he's on his feet, unclenching his hands and easing his face back into something like normal, and it's about then he notices the blood dripping between his knuckles. Carson grabs his hand almost desperately, and John can get that, needing a patient you can actually help, so he submits to it and doesn't look at anyone.

Elizabeth's hand on his shoulder startles him, makes him reach for the gun he shouldn't be carrying, but she just gives him that firm look of utter determination that really never gets old.

"It's my turn," she says, iron under the velvet cool of her tone.

"Get him back," John says, because there's nothing else he can say.

Teyla's waiting for him in the gym, already stretching and warming up. He finds his sticks and touches foreheads perfunctorily, a quick gesture before they begin to spar. It's not a real fight by any stretch, both of them too distracted to focus clearly.

Ronon comes in a little later, sweaty from his run and smelling of ocean salt and ozone, and he picks up his sticks without so much as glancing at either of them. John looks at Ronon and suddenly that's just too much, it's wrong for his team to be pulled apart like this, and he drops his sticks with a clatter just as Teyla strikes out at his chest. He blocks it with his arm, not even feeling the pain that'll bruise soon enough, and stalks over to Ronon. It's easy to startle him, to grab him by the back of his neck and pull his head down, jerking their foreheads together hard enough to make a hollow noise. He doesn't close his eyes, stares his challenge into Ronon's confusion, and it's like a gift when Ronon closes his own eyes and eases his muscles, understanding that this isn't so much an Athosian greeting as it is a necessity. He breathes in Ronon's breath and slowly the tension in his shoulders eases, and the press of foreheads is less of a challenge and more of an embrace. He steps back with a last sigh, going back to get his sticks, but Teyla stops him with a touch to his shoulder and bows her own head. He touches his forehead to hers without hesitation, without thinking once about what this looks like to an outsider.

"When he gets back," John starts before his throat closes on the words.

"We will teach him this," Teyla says, and yes, that's it exactly. They'll bring him here, show him how to hold the sticks and how to breathe another's breath and how very much they need him. Ronon's hand falls on his shoulder, hot and heavy, covering Teyla's smaller fingers, and it's almost enough. Almost.

The second tape is delivered on schedule, exactly as promised, a status update of the worst kind. It's not too bad, really, just more beating, and Rodney is even more aware now which is good. Less doped-looking, which Carson attributes to rest and food and a lack of being on the run. So they're giving him the basics, at least, and judging by the small heap of cloth in the corner of the shot, he might even have clothes.

He goes limp this time, makes them work harder, and John can admire that as much as he admired the stubborn tenacity of last time. This is just as deliberate and annoys them more instead of making them look forward to breaking him. It's even better when a bare foot snaps out and knocks the camera away with a dizzying swoop of images that they can probably analyze to get an idea of the place Rodney's being held - John actually gives a little whoop of delight, nearly jumping out of his chair, and Teyla smiles at him indulgently.

They get a little peeved about that, of course, but then they zoom in on Rodney's face and that's just hilarious because Carson _does_ jump up out of his seat, babbling about dilation and concussions and Rodney starts giggling as if he can hear Carson which really just makes the poor doctor fret worse.

It ends not long after that, when Rodney makes some motion with his hands (John puts three Snickers on it being the bird, and Ronon takes him up without knowing what he actually means, because man, Snickers) that really pisses off his captors - the sharp blow to the face makes John wince but it's nothing special, except that suddenly the guards in the background of the video go pale and a short, delicate-looking man is shrieking at the guy with the crop and it gets kinda confusing for a moment, what with everyone suddenly wanting to protect Rodney, and then the video goes black.

"Hmm," Radek says, and just like that he's gone. John just stretches out the cramp in his back because damn, that wasn't bad at all. Rodney's doing great. He clearly hasn't told them a single goddamn thing because they're still asking for stupidly impossible things like all the technology of the Ancients. Ronon's hand touches his shoulder, though, strangely light and gentle - he looks up at the tight look on Ronon's face and thinks about how long Ronon was on the run, how hard he had to try not to get attached to anyone in case something just like this happened.

"Wonder if the gym is open," John says lazily, and Teyla gives him an approving nod. He tosses a lazy salute at Elizabeth, already working on a rebuttal, and she gives him a crisp smile that shows how hard this has been hitting her. He makes a mental note to check on her after his match with Teyla and Ronon. Elizabeth was never meant to deal with war or hostages or torture, and she does great but it wears. God, does it wear you down.

But first, Ronon needs to lose the tight clip in his walk and the careful lack of expression that reveals more than it's meant to.

The next tape leaves John a total wreck. Elizabeth doesn't understand until he rewinds it and pauses it on the exact moment he knew Rodney was going to break.

Kavanagh comes to John the next morning (barely morning, it's something like three when he checks his watch after the second knock at his door) with a recipe for knockout gas. The man looks like he's spent all night on it, hair pulled out of his ponytail and bruises under his eyes, so John listens to him and steers him to his room in the science quarters and asks the right questions about how it disperses and the effect time and dosage, and Kavanagh stutters a little when he's gently pushed into his room and John comes in behind him but keeps talking in a stream of babbled words that make more sense than anything has a right to be at three in the morning. It's familiar enough that John just peels off Kavanagh's boots for him and tips him into bed, sitting down on the edge and waiting patiently until the words run out and the man's eyes droop shut. He's about to leave when he remembers this isn't his regular scientist, so he backtracks and takes off Kavanagh's glasses and sets them carefully on the nightstand.

Bates is in the hall when he comes out, not even pretending to be doing anything other than waiting for John, and he falls into step without so much as a raised eyebrow.

"Knockout gas," is all John says, and he can see the wheels turning in Bates' head, considering the possibilities of that from all angles.

"We'd need to know where he is," Bates finally murmurs, steering John away from his quarters and towards the gateroom. A cold feeling settles into his gut.

"This isn't the normal time," he states softly, and Bates can hear the thinly-veiled warning and question perfectly.

"I saw the last tape," is all he says, and John has to stop and lean against the wall for a moment with his eyes shut. Yeah. The last tape. He doesn't want to see this.

"Sir," Bates says softly, and courtesy and consideration are so unusual for the man that John can't do anything other than take a deep breath and go into autopilot. It's the military commander of Atlantis that steps into Elizabeth's office, not the team leader or friend or anything else.

He gives Elizabeth's red, tired eyes a quick acknowledgement before he sits, ramrod-straight, eyes fixed on the screen.

It's as every bit as bad as he expected and makes him go colder with every passing second. Bates opens the door for Teyla just as they finish the whipping, and Ronon is greeted with the sound of retching as Rodney's stomach rejects the taste of his own blood sucked from the coils of whip wedged in his mouth, stretching his cheeks obscenely. No one calls Carson in. John makes a mental note to give the man the basics later - Carson is even less equipped to deal with this than Elizabeth, with her white lips and shaking shoulders.

He has to step outside when they start fucking Rodney's mouth with the handle of the whip. It's turning light, pinks and golds streaking the gateroom in watercolor. Bates offers him a small cup of water, and a few minutes later he's staring at it in his hand with no memory of taking it or drinking it. It crushes easily in his fist before Bates is back, gently prying his hand open and reminding him quietly about the healing scabs on his palms.

"All the civilians need training," John hears himself say from somewhere distant. "I know they're getting handgun, but they need endurance and hostage training as well. We'll need to schedule it so they can still work - evenings, and it needs to be more than boot camp. Get someone started on that."

"Advanced weaponry?" Bates asks, and even though he knows it's just to get him thinking about something other than Rodney, he gives it full thought for a few moments.

"At the end of the session," he decides. "I want them to be able to handle normal things first. If the scientists are handed anything more than a Beretta, it's all in a handbasket anyway."

"Sir," Bates assents, and John knows without having to be told that it'll be done, and done well, and that Bates is just as possessive of his people as he is. This will never happen again. They'll make sure of it.

He looks at the brightening gateroom, at the pastel light falling through the empty arch of the gate, sets his shoulders and goes back into Elizabeth's office.

The next day the bastards start blustering, and John knows something's gone wrong.

"Prove he's still alive," he snarls into the radio, his gut clenching as he remembers all over again that the radio on the other end is Rodney's, should be with Rodney and not these asinine sons of bitches.

"I'm afraid you'll have to give us something more concrete than that," the voice wheedles, and right now John would give them his right arm with a P-90 attached just for another damn video.

He gives the negotiations back to Elizabeth before he has to be restrained from running through the wormhole.

He doesn't sleep that night. He goes to the physics lab and makes a cup of coffee, the really bad instant kind, and he puts it on Rodney's designated bench and doesn't drink it. The silent laptop, closed and innocuous, makes him want to break something, so he carefully sits down away from anything and curls his arms against his stomach. Rodney would kill him for breaking anything is here - all of this is stuff they don't understand yet, stuff Rodney is very interested in.

He stays like that until Miko startles him awake - she blinks sleepily once and then just walks over and hugs him, one hand holding a steaming mug of tea away from them. He closes his eyes and concentrates very hard on not shaking or making stupid noises or otherwise undermining his own authority.

Simpson stumbles in and takes five minutes to notice them, mumbling under her breath at a whiteboard until she turns around and says, "_Oh,_" and then she's there too, taking Miko's mug and setting it aside before pulling John's head against her stomach. He thinks inane thoughts about threesomes until Radek walks in, and then he does start shaking, and he's pretty sure it's laughter. Miko runs a hand over his hair, and Radek looks blankly at them for half a minute before shaking his head and just walking by them. His hand squeezes John's shoulder reassuringly as he passes, and just as John's taking a deep breath and getting ready to leave Kavanagh sticks his head in, and isn't he in a whole different department or something?

"Do you think you could check my math, Colonel?" he asks as if John isn't having a breakdown in the science labs. "I hear you make a decent calculator."

John finishes that deep breath and nods, smiling at the ladies and getting another quick set of hugs before he saunters out, all confidence and reliability and normalcy. Kavanagh's math is fine, except for a few glaring errors that are put there on purpose and make him laugh a little, which may or may not have been the point.

Elizabeth wins the next morning. She huffs and puffs and blows their crap down - John gets word that they're sending through another tape and starts to run for the gateroom, because fuck, it's something. And then the radio clicks on again and it's like everything goes into slow motion, with Bates saying "Doctor McKay" like he's grinning and Bates grinning is a scary mental image.

John hits the walkway next to Elizabeth's office at a flat run, but there's too many people and he can't see until he barrels right through to the stairs, and then he's looking down at Rodney in Ronon's arms as naked as the day he was born. Teyla looks up like a jubilant mother, one hand on Rondey's ankle, and that sunburned face follows like a flower. John can't breathe, his whole chest crushing his lungs, and Rodney gives him a stupid little wave and smile and then just tilts his head against Ronon's neck and goes limp.

John flies down the steps, finds Rodney's pulse even as he nearly knocks Ronon over. Teyla's hand on his shoulder helps ground him, gets him breathing again, and he has the presence of mind to get the hell out of the way when Ronon rumbles something about Carson. They make a train all the way to the infirmary that's already set up to receive them. Carson doesn't have to shoo them out, but he can't get rid of them either - they clog up the hall outside, soon joined by Rodney's scientists, and wait.

It's the best day of John's life.

It's a small forever (another day, a whole day) until John sweet-talks his way in, promising Carson he'll never break another bone or get shot or _anything_ really I swear cross my heart. He can hear Radek protesting behind him as he bounds forward, but he jerks to a stop just outside the privacy curtain. What if Rodney's asleep? What if he's awake? What if he looks at John and knows that he's seen all the tapes? What if he doesn't know he's in Atlantis?

He finally just sticks his head in, and Rodney is awake and reading his own chart, and doesn't that just figure. They blink at each other for a long moment. John can feel the corner of his mouth turning up in genuine delight, and Rodney's answering smile is like cotton candy at a summer fair.

"Hey," John says, and he knows it'll be okay.


End file.
